Re: [Evolution] Compiling on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS?

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Tue, 2018-04-10 at 20:36 +0200, Bjørn T Johansen wrote:
> An alternative is to just use a distro with better support for
> > Evolution (e.g. Fedora), which also meets your VMware requirement.
> > OTOH Ubuntu *may* improve general Gnome support in the future now
> > that it has abandoned Unity.

Just for clarity: it's really not anything to do with Ubuntu's support
of Gnome per se.  Ubuntu has always had quite good support for Gnome;
it just wasn't the default desktop in the past.  It was easy to get
though.

The problem is that the OP wants to use an LTS release.  Suggesting
Fedora doesn't meet that requirement; if they wanted to use a rolling
or non-LTS distro they could also choose Ubuntu 17.10 for example which
has Gnome 3.26 right now.  As you point out, waiting a few weeks will
get them a new LTS distro with the Gnome 3.28 release.

There ARE issues with Evolution on Ubuntu but they're not directly
related to GNOME support.  Basically, Ubuntu chose Thunderbird, not
Evolution, as the main Ubuntu mail client.  In practice that means
Evolution doesn't get updated during a release cycle.  So for example,
right now the version of Evolution available in Ubuntu 17.10 (latest
release ATM) is only 3.26.1 which has a number of known bugs which have
been fixed in later 3.26.x point releases.  Ubuntu doesn't package the
Evolution point releases, so you pretty much jump from an X.1 point
release to the X+1.1 point release, never getting the X.2, X.3, etc.
bugfix releases.

It's possible the LTS releases are better about this, I'm not sure.

At some point I'd like to engage the Ubuntu devs about this and see if
we can do better, but for now that's the way things are.